New River Bridge

Folk artist Lewis Miller completed this sketch of New River Bridge and Ingles’ Ferry while visiting his family in Radford in 1859. It shows a scene of the bridge with the surrounding town and hilly countryside. The New River Bridge was a wooden covered bridge on the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad line that was about 700 feet long. The Union army destroyed it in the battle of New River Bridge on May 10, 1864, but the Confederates constructed a makeshift replacement within a few weeks.